Tuesday 27 October 2015

Original Mountain Marathon Oct 2015 - Tweedsmuir, Scottish Borders

OMM 2015 - Tweedsmuir, Scotland
Medium Score Day 1 - Saturday

This year's Mountain Marathon was held in the beautiful Scottish Borders area just beyond Moffat. It is a relatively 'close' event location for us - though our son, Daniel, drives up from London. After a 4 hour drive, we parked up in our motorvan on the parking field.
Overnight it belted with rain and the fields were awash with puddles!
Walking up to the start on Saturday morning 
It's raining - we had the last start time so most other competitors had gone ahead

Dan having a brew and looking at the Map of the area.
The map is blank at this stage - we only get our competition map having started

Some other late starters sheltering from the rain in the barn

9.25am and we are at the Start at the edge of the woods

All kitted up and ready to go! Team Woolford 1371 on the Medium Score Event.
We have 6 hours to get as many Control Points as we can - going over the mountain terrain to the overnight campsite. We have to carry all our gear for camping the one night - together with food, dry clothing, stove etc

This view shows Dan leaving the first control - along a boggy forest ride 
Looking back down the valley - need to descend this
 

Always time for a photo!
Looking down to the valley bottom and then across to the stream alongside the block of trees - we climbed up to the source of the stream for our next control


Similar view - the weather is clearing (hoods down).
The next control gave us 60 points so far!
Fantastic views all round - wind turbines in the distance!

Faster progress along an isolated road - we are going over the top in the distance

20 minutes to go! Down this hillside, following the stream, to the valley bottom.
You can just see the meandering river in the bottom 

Dan leads downhill - I had trouble keeping with him!
Edging closer to the bottom - 15 minutes to go!

We made it - although 1 minute over our allotted 6 hours gave a penalty of 2 points!
Still 138 points on Day 1 is creditable - it put us in 60th place out of 152 finishers!
This later photo is of the overnight field campsite  - a few lights twinkling

Priority is to have fluids and eat as much as you can - brew on! 

Snug in the sleeping bag! Our gear stuffed at the end of the tent

Keeping warm! Three running layers and 2 fleeces - plus sleeping bag!
Sleep comes intermittently!

1 comment:

  1. Fantastic photos Anton, & even better results. Well done both of you. I have no pics because didn't want the weight of a camera or phone. I think you must have done a very different route to us. Although the landscape in your photos is familiar, I don't recognise any of the control points as ones that we went to.

    ReplyDelete